Mandy Nolan

I’m out RAT hunting. I’ve been on the road for an hour checking for local infestations. My daughter’s at home on the Rat App and...

Whatever you believe about covid, however, is irrelevant. We are here. It is here. It’s the crocodile skimming past you in the river. It might miss you this time, but get you next

‘I died’. That’s what we say as comedians when we don’t do well on stage. A lot of the language around our performance has a life/death metaphor. For example, when we do really well we say ‘I killed’ or a colleague might say ‘you slayed them’. It’s extreme language, and I guess as a life-calling comedy is an extreme sport. To survive in the industry you have to develop a certain resilience. An ability to die and live again. Well at least metaphorically. 

If Jesus was born now and the government knew his folks were rubbing shoulders with mules, lowing cattle and bleating lambs, child protection would have swooped in to remove the baby.

I know we’re all about gratitude, but can I just have a moment to really honour how horrible this year has been? In order for us to celebrate resilience, we have to acknowledge that we’ve all had an extended stay in shit town. And right now it doesn’t look like we’ll be checking out in a hurry. So much sucks.

Once, when I was on stage, a large moth flew up my skirt. Everyone in the front row saw it. It was very funny. And embarrassing. I quipped, ‘At least it’s not flying out. Then I tagged it with ‘– of course it’s a bogong’. Everyone laughed because it sounds like ‘bogan’. I kind of always thought of the moth as a bogan; loud, out on the street, bumping into things.

This Christmas I have decided to buy my friends and family experiences.  Experiences also don’t require the purchasing of ‘stuff’. And you don’t have to wrap the stuff in more useless stuff. I’m really trying to reduce the Christmas stuffing. I’m on what I call a ‘de-stuff’ diet. It’s hard, because I am one of those people who has been addicted to stuff. Experiences, if well chosen, can have a low carbon footprint. They can be stuffless.

I miss travelling. I miss the thrill of going somewhere new. The last few years feels like we’ve had no adventures. No interesting and foreign lands to explore.  It’s been all about staying at home. Thanks to Annastacia Palaszczuk, going to Queensland feels a bit like going overseas. I’ve had to cross the border for work a few times lately. 

It was 2018, and in this crisis we witnessed the best that the world can be. We all watched in nervous anticipation as cave diving hobbyists from around the world became experts in a rescue never before attempted. It showed the power of collaboration for a higher purpose. It showed true courage; of the men who risked their lives in the complex underground maze of caves, of the boys who maintained the most incredible calm, and of the parents who never gave up hope.

I think about those little girls. But mainly I think about their parents and family. The people in the shadowland. I want to tell them everything will be okay, but I don’t know that. I don’t really even know them. This is a small community. When tragedy strikes, and the wave consumes one of us, the ripples hit the rest. 

‘The current trend of fillers and procedures, and this obsession with filtering are wiping out generations of beauty.’

I love Kangaroos. Like most people my age I grew up eating my dinner off a Skippy plate. Seeing Sonny and Skip was a real incentive to finish my dinner. I wanted a kangaroo friend too. I wanted to say ‘What’s that, Skip?’ And Skip would tell me ‘There was a murder down at the gorge’...

In order to transition from a fossil fuel powered car industry I think we need to address our car culture. We’re petrol heads. Mad Max would have been a very different movie if Mel had to find a charging station instead of fuel.

So what does it feel like to live in a hetero-normative world when that is not who you are? How do you feel valued? How do you feel included? How do you get equal access to the same things straight white girls, like me, take for granted? 

This is a picture of my daughter and her friend looking out to sea. They don’t know I’m taking this photo. We’ve been walking the beach and the two have scrambled onto a rock to watch the sunset. They’re talking quietly as they look outwards to this world that they are to inherit.

It seems content creators are running out of ideas to make cheap TV. It’s amazing what you can come up with when you lose your ethics! Here’s a few quick pitches: How about a show about chubby rich women trying to drop weight by living in Ethiopia with a malnourished family for six weeks? No?

We are hearing about long covid and the many complex health issues that people are facing, long after the virus has passed through their system. I knew about that, but what I didn’t know about was that men who get covid are six times more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

I love my bed. Right now, during the pandemic, I love my bed more than ever. It’s become what I look forward to most. Every night, it’s my end destination. It’s the place I know I am going. It’s the warm hug that restores me. These are stressful times. There is division. There is uncertainty. There is anger.

I have a friend who is a supervisor in a store that belongs to one of the big supermarket chains. She’s had a corporate career and these days enjoys a pretty cruisy role as a store supervisor. Well cruisy pre-pandemic. These days she’s a frontline worker in a war zone. The other day she went home and wept. That’s not something she ever does. It’s a covid cry. She says ‘people are screaming at me from both sides’. 

I am sick of talking about COVID, sick of it dominating everything I read or listen to. Sick of seeing people get angry in the post office. Sick of seeing angry guys punch people for freedom. I am sick of staying at home. Sick of listening to conspiracies, and politicians. Sick of covid conversation. So I’ve reflected on one major personal positive that has come out of this lockdown that I can share, and it would have to be my new love. My big supporter. My quiet achiever… my bum bag. 

Today I woke up profoundly aware that as a white woman I live in a country that affords me extreme privilege. While baristas and hairdressers take to our front lines as ‘freedom fighters’– getting shouty about the right to not wear a mask during a global pandemic – women in Afghanistan are waking up today wondering if the last 20 years was a dream.